water

There’s a political earthquake going on in Delhi right now. Biraj Swain (Exfam India, now campaigning and researching on water) looks at its immediate impact on poor people’s access to water and electricity. Last month marked the first month in office of the anti-corruption movement turned political party, the Aam Admi ‘Common Man’ Party government in Delhi, India. Two days into office, they had made …

I don’t do much on water (as my pal Henry Northover at WaterAid never fails to remind me) but last week, I was in Tajikistan to help our team think through their water-related work. They already run the Tajikistan Water Supply and Sanitation (TajWSS) network, which combines a high level ‘convening and brokering’ approach to finding solutions to the country’s dire water situation, with a …

In the corridors of Oxfam and beyond, ‘convening and brokering’ has become a new development fuzzword. I talked about it in my recent review of the Africa Power and Politics Programme, and APPP promptly got back to me and suggested a discussion on how convening and brokering is the same/different to the APPP’s proposals that aid agencies should abandon misguided attempts to impose ‘best practice’ solutions …

I have skimmed a few of the curtain raisers for next week’s Earth Summit in Rio, and sure enough, they fall into the familiar pattern of ‘If I ruled (or at least ‘managed’) the world’ documents: a summary of the research evidence, a call to arms (in this case save planet and species, preferably both), and a shopping list of policy recommendations. In such reports, …

This is encouraging. Alex Evans has been banging on for a while about the need for a ‘World Resources Report’ that charts the state of planetary resource stocks (not flows, like all the other reports). Now the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has done exactly that. The State of Land and Water Resources (SOLAW) is FAO’s first flagship publication on the global status of …

Daniel Yeo, Senior Policy Analyst at WaterAid (twitter handle @yukinosaru), indulges in some outrageously blatant lobbying about why Oxfam should do more on water. A few weeks ago, Duncan posted his reflections on Oxfam’s discussions on water. As pleased as I am about Oxfam’s interest, it begs the question, why haven’t more development NGOs dived into water already? We can all relate to water – and any …

Just spent an intense couple of days at Oxfam Reflects, a biannual event where a mix of staff, partners and a sprinkling of professors and other wonks shut themselves away to talk through a thematic issue that is confusing the organization and needs a bit of kicking around. This one was on water – trying to cover both Oxfam’s traditional specialism in water, sanitation and …

Fascinating morning earlier this week discussing Alex Evans’ new paper for WWF and Oxfam on ‘Resource Scarcity, fair shares and development’. Alex summarizes the paper in the Guardian, so I won’t rehearse his arguments for adding ‘fair shares’ to the more accepted topics of responding to resource scarcity by increasing production and strengthening resilience. Instead, here are some reflections coming out of the discussion + …

Last Tuesday was world water day, and I get the sense that water is one of those issues that is only going to rise further up the development agenda, both in terms of watsan (drinking water and sanitation), and because water is one of the key and ever-tighter pinchpoints of resource scarcity in farming and food systems. So in catch-up mode (and because a new …

This is the summary slide from a recent powerpoint on the global challenges facing humanity between now and 2030. It sets out the key questions (easier to read if you click on the slide). The answers to any one of which might well be ‘no’, with scary consequences. And please don’t try and dismiss this as ill-informed climate alarmism. It’s from Prof John Beddington, chief scientific …

Posts navigation

This is a conversational blog written and maintained by Duncan Green, strategic adviser for Oxfam GB and author of ‘From Poverty to Power’. This personal reflection is not intended as a comprehensive statement of Oxfam's agreed policies.